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The author identifies a Law of Requisite Cognitive Capacity in human communication, conflict resolution, and cooperation solicitation. Based on Ashby's Law of the Requisite Variety and Jaques's theory of cognitive capacity and by combining the author's previous work on the cognitive model of improving communication efficiency, a quantitative limitation for people to understand each other can be identified. On the Jaquesian Cognitive Capacity Strata, it is necessary for the person on a higher stratum to make extra efforts to explain/ translate his/her mental model for the person (or P-individual) on a lower stratum, using the language/mental model available at the lower stratum. Without such explanation/translation, the person on a lower stratum cannot cognize the mental model being used and will misunderstand, therefore effective communication cannot be achieved. The existence of such limitation explains a number of interesting social and organizational phenomena.
Introduction
A hypothesis usually links two observations (or one observation with one explanation) into a relationship of causality (i.e., an explanatory model,) that then can be used to extrapolate to predict new phenomena, which can be confirmed (for the time being) or falsified (forever) by new observations. In a similar construction, I am trying to build a linkage among three theoretical elements: W. Ross Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety (Ashby, 1958), Elliott Jaques's hypothesis of Stratified Human Cognitive Capacity (Jaques, 1986), and the constructivist cognition-based model of communication I built to help improving effectiveness and efficiency of communication (simplified as the Communicatics Model) (Hu, 1993, 1995).
The result of integrating these three elements suggests an interesting hypothetical theorem that may be useful for people studying human communication, conflict resolution and consensus building in an organizational development context. A number of preliminary cases of observation seem to support this theorem, which can be called the Law of Requisite Cognitive Capacity. This theorem highlights a specific pre-requisite when dealing with communication issues: When trying to communicate to a person functioning at a lower Jaquesian stratum of cognition capacity, one needs to always put in extra resources to translate one's original language or representation of the issue into the language being used in the other communicator's stratum. On the other hand, when one is receiving communication from a person who functions on a lower Jaquesian...